


Lateral Horizon

by GenitalGrievous



Category: Event Horizon (1997), Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Crossover, Depression, Gen, Ghostship, Gore, Insanity, Murder, Parallel Universes, Quantum Mirror, Suicide, Ultra Violence, inner darkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-09-30
Packaged: 2018-02-19 09:53:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2383976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GenitalGrievous/pseuds/GenitalGrievous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Infinite Space, Infinite Terror.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lateral Horizon

**Author's Note:**

> This piece takes place between the first crew of the Event Horizon being lost, and the start of the movie. Could be enjoyed by anyone who hasn't seen Event Horizon, but Stargate SG-1 knowledge is a must.

Lateral Horizon

"Oh god--Sir! General O'Neill! You better come in here!" Colonel Carter's voice crackled to life on the Walkie-talkies freezing Jack and Teal'c in their place. Their eyes met. Carter rarely panicked, though the gothic monstrosity of an abandoned ship they had been exploring had put them all on edge. Nodding to each other, the two men took off in a brisk sprint towards where they had left Daniel and Carter attempting to gain entrance to what appeared to be the main control room. 

_Stupid, it was stupid to leave those two alone. I know better than that._ Jack swore silently to himself. _Always leave one of them with Teal'c, one of them with me. They're too important to leave wandering around alone..._

Jack burst into the control room, sidearm drawn and held ready with Teal'c covering his rear. Ahead of him was an enormous cross-shaped viewing window, and through the window barely illuminated by a dull glow that emanated from the center was the object of Carter's panic.

"It's a Supergate." Jack whispered, his mind refusing to fully wrap around the implications. Daniel turned away from him, the edges of his hair ignited blue by the light of the Supergate, his eyes wild with fear. With a quick flash Proxima Centauri appeared around the side of the 'gate in a lateral horizon, flooding the deck with dazzling sunlight. The shadow of the rim of the gate fell over Jack and temperature of the air around him seemed to suddenly drop several degrees. 

"Something's not right about it." Carter whispered, turning back towards him. "Look at it, it looks--Weird."

It was a Supergate, or it looked as much like one as the one built by the Ori, but at the same time it didn't look quite right. The event horizon shone a slightly different blue than normal, though it was clearly connected to a wormhole it looked flat and lacked the sparkling pool appearance they had grown used to. The dull surface reflected the stars like a still pool of water at night. Jack's stomach lurched as he realized that the 'gate was steadily growing larger, the dead ship was being drawn towards its gravitational pull. He willed his heart to slow, willed the fear to not taint his speech. "Alright kids, back to the rings, we're going to get the hell out of here and report to base."

Daniel had turned back towards the imposing view, his entire body backlit by the rising star haloing him in a red aura. Jack almost couldn't hear him say, "But there's so much to do here." His voice was subdued, facing away from the rest of SG-1. The hairs on the back of Jack's neck rose, his head thudding wildly with an oncoming headache. 

"Nope, we stay here any longer we're gonna wind up on the other side of that 'gate, and who the hell knows where that'll put us. Come on, we're pulling out." Jack intoned, pleading. Teal'c stood by his side impassively and nodded, Sam reluctantly moved towards them, but Daniel stayed riveted to the spot. 

"Jack." He breathed, turning again towards them and Jack found that he hated the look in Daniel's eyes. It was nothing like the way they lit up when he wanted to stay behind for some archeological dig or anthropological study. This time they were lit by a different passion. "This ship--" Daniel looking up at the vaulted ceiling of the control room, "She's special. Can't you tell?"

"Teal'c, that's your cue to grab him. We're gone." Jack turned away as Teal'c stepped towards Daniel, his arms open.

"Come DanielJackson. It is not safe." Teal'c said calmly in his usual monotone.

"She'll protect us, Teal'c." Daniel cast his eyes around the room, his voice breathy. "She'll protect us where we're go--" Daniel's sentence was cut off as Teal'c wrapped his muscular arms around his middle and hauled him into the air. 

"Good man, tout de suite guys, we're moving double time." Gesturing with his left hand towards the door, Jack held his zat in his right steadily pointed forward. He glanced back at Teal'c, Carter having moved to his right side, and saw that Daniel had gone limp in his arms, his eyes glassily staring off into nothing. 

"I don't like it here." Carter whispered, her eyes darting to meet Jack's. "Where's the crew? What happened here?" 

"I don't know, and I sure as hell don't want to be here to find out. Let's boogie Teal'c." Jack picked up speed, Carter and Teal'c flanking him as they ran briskly down the long arching hallway towards the rings they had used to enter the ship, situated midway down a long hallway by an airlock and docking station. By the time they arrived he felt winded, much more than would be normal for the relatively short distance. He gasped, quickly entering coordinates onto the dialing pad. "Beam us up, Scottie."

\---

"I don't like it, General Landry, Sir." Carter was saying into the monitor. Daniel was spread out in a corner of the flight-deck catatonic, with his jacket bunched up under his head where Teal'c had left it. 

Jack nodded emphatically. "Something affected Daniel there, sir."

"What's wrong with Daniel?" Vala pushed General Landry to the side, bringing her face closer to her monitor.

"--We don't know if it was airborne, or if he touched something dangerous, but on the ship he wasn't acting like himself. The second Teal'c had him in the air he just went limp. He's been completely unresponsive since we beamed back on board our ship." Carter clarified. "But something about this Supergate is not right, sir."

"Not right?" Landry leaned forward, pushing Vala off-camera. "What do you mean, Colonel Carter?"

"It doesn't look like the previous Supergates we've seen, sir." Carter began, "The gate has different symbols and the event horizon looks--well-- _glassy._ "

"Glassy?" Landry echoed.

"Glassy--" Carter repeated, halting and turning sharply to Jack. "Like glass. Damn it! How could I miss that!?"

"Uh, fill me in Carter?" Jack tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice. He had meant to go on a quick routine mission with the team, for old times' sake, and it was rapidly turning into anything but. _Mitchell's the lucky one._ Jack mused. _All he has to deal with is sitting in a hospital bed with a broken ankle while I run his show._

"Sir, it's not a Supergate at all!" Carter exclaimed, her hands gesticulating wildly to punctuate the sentence. " _It's a Quantum Mirror._ "

Out of the corner of his eyes Jack could see Teal'c straighten up beside Daniel's body, suddenly attuned to the briefing. "That is impossible." Teal'c rumbled softly.

"Teal'c's right, Carter. The ship was being pulled into it, how does that work if the ship was being pulled _towards_ it. Without a wormhole how it could have that kind of gravitational pull?" Jack wanted to deny that it could be a Quantum Mirror, not because a Supergate was easier to accept, but because he didn't want the answer to the question of what kind of civilization would have build a Quantum Mirror of that size, who possibly could have had both the desire and monumental resources?

"I don't think it was drifting in a gravitational pull, sir. I think something on that ship is still running." Carter nearly whispered. 

"She wants to go back." The hoarse voice behind them froze everyone. They turned to Daniel, still laying on the floor unmoving, his eyes focused on something towards the ceiling. "She wants to take us home."

Jack shuddered involuntarily and looked away from Daniel. "Carter."

"The situation is decayed in the State of Denmark." Teal'c intoned.

"Something is rotten, Teal'c." Carter whispered.

"Indeed." He replied, glancing back to Daniel still catatonic on the floor.

"You're not going to like this." Landry said over the monitor, adopting a commanding tone.

"I should have been there, I should have been on this mission." Jack could hear Vala arguing with someone off to the side of Landry. 

"I'm not stepping foot back on that ship." Jack whipped his head around to face the screen. "Not on my life."

"We need you to find the source of that signal, General." Landry leaned in close to his screen, "The brass think there's a link to a huge source of Naquadria." 

"General Landry--" Jack struggled to keep his voice steady, an unknown trepidation creeping up his spine.

"--Sir." Carter interrupted. "We have no way of finding out what happened to Daniel if we stay here."

"I don't need to know _what happened_ to Daniel," Jack hissed, shielding the microphone with his palm, "I just need to cure him."

"ColonelCarter is correct. We cannot cure DanielJackson if we do not know what ails him." _Big Teal'c, always the voice of reason._ Jack tried not to groan.

"Fine. One hour. I will spend one more hour on that ship, and no more. I don't care what we do or don't find. Our priority is Daniel." Narrowing his eyes, Jack practically growled into the microphone. 

"Very well, General O'Neill. Landry out." The monitor went blank. 

"I don't like this." Jack scrubbed through his hair with both hands. "I don't like this one bit."

\---

The moment they ringed in Daniel came to life in Teal'c's arms, his eyes as wild as they had been on their first trip about the abandoned ship. He scrambled to the floor, hesitating for a moment on all fours, before rising to his full height. "Are you with us, DanielJackson?" Teal'c's deep voice reverberated against the dark steel walls of the ship. 

"I know where to go." Daniel gasped and took off like a shot down the long hallway, running at feel speed before his disappearance had fully registered among the rest of the team.

"Quick! After him!" Jack took off running, Teal'c on his heels steadily overtaking him with Carter barely behind. Daniel was already ten yards ahead of them, his feet thundering loudly on the metal flooring, the echoes almost deafening, as though the ship were closing in on them. Jack physically shook his head to rid himself of the thought. Whatever was affecting Daniel, there was no way this ship was alive. 

As Daniel reached the end of the hallway he slammed hard into a large red button, causing the door at the end to spiral open. Daniel dove through head first as soon as the opening was large enough to accommodate his slim frame. To Jack's immediate relief, the door continued opening as they ran towards it, fully opened by the time they arrived. The spherical room beyond the door was enormous, the ceiling rising at least a hundred yards into the air, every wall was covered in gigantic metal spikes, like pseudo-gothic stalactites rising into the cold air. In the center of the room was a liquid black sphere, like a shriveled rotten orange, the surface bubbling and swirling where it was suspending by cones from the top and bottom.

There was no sign of Daniel.

"Spread out team, look for an opening, anyplace he could be hiding." Jack nodded to Teal'c and the three of them fanned out, following the narrow path that ran alongside a pool of water surrounding the sphere.

"Daniel?" Jack grunted into his walkie-talkie. "Where are you?" There was only static as a response. "Daniel? Do you copy?"

"There must be some sort of interference here." Carter offered quietly.

Peering around the various metallic cones, watching for hatches and doorways, the three eventually met on the opposite side of the sphere with still no trace of Daniel. Together the three soldiers turned towards the sphere. 

"Y-you don't think--that--?" Carter wrapped her arms around her middle, hugging herself tightly. 

"What did I say?" Jack grumbled. "I don't like this place, that's what I said. I don't like this damn place one fucking bit." Stepping carefully, Jack walking along the narrow grated bridge that bisected the pool of water on either side of the sphere. He expected the Sphere to have a scent to it, like engine grease or coolant maybe, but standing a couple feet away he was affected by a complete lack of sensory input. Even sounds seem to fade away in the vicinity of the sphere. He leaned in, observing his reflection in the orange-black liquid. He looked distorted, older, grizzled, like a Jack that was not the Jack he was. A past Jack, a future Jack, a parallel Jack. The Jack inside the sphere looked out at him, assessed him, seemed to bore into him with dark probing eyes. Jack swallowed and took a step away. 

As he drew away from the sphere his auditory senses gradually returned, though muted slightly, he could hear Carter repetitively calling his name behind him. He turned at looked at her and Teal'c, standing together across the pool, watching him. _Judging me, sizing me up. Are they watching me like the other Jack? Do they know the other Jack? They think they know everything._ Sour thoughts invaded Jack's mind, he narrowed his eyes at them. "Do you have any better ideas, Carter?" Jack spat.

"Sir?" Carter exchanged sideways glances with Teal'c. 

Jack stepped roughly onto the metal grating causes an echo that bounced around the spherical room. "I _said_ do _you_ have any better ideas, _Carter_?"

"O'Neill. You are not behaving like yourself." Teal'c's voice seemed to loosen the tension building in Jack. Of course they're not judging him, these are his closest friends. They're all just worried about Daniel.

"You're right, big guy." Jack glanced surreptitiously behind him at the Sphere and watched it pulsate, his reflection no longer visible from his vantage point. "I think I just got on edge. Daniel had to have found a way out of this room, so let's start searching the rest of the ship." He crossed the bridge in two more large steps, relieved to have created more space between himself and the mysterious sphere. "He's not in here, that's for sure." Secretly Jack wanted to put more space between him at this room, Daniel definitely was not in the room anywhere, but rather than spending more time looking for a hidden hatch or escape, Jack would prefer to find an alternate route through the rest of the ship. Maybe Daniel would even find them.

With careful deliberate steps the three circumvented the sphere, dodging silvery puddles of coolant on the floor, keeping close to each other with their hands on their zats, fingering the quick-release closures of their drop-leg holsters. This was the first mission they had ever undertaken to explore a mysteriously abandoned spacecraft and the ghost-ship put them all on edge. Jack tried to remind himself that the effect was purely psychological, it was an abandoned ship, that was all. There was no sign of foul play aboard the ship, and nothing had gone wrong aside from Daniel going AWOL. As they exited the room the door spiralled closed behind them. Jack froze.

"It must be automatic." Carter offered, her voice small in the long hallway. 

"Indeed." Teal'c nodded resolutely. 

Staring at the sealed door, Jack was not convinced. He looked away and studied the hallway that extended far into the distance, at least a thousand yards down. They had ringed in about halfway through the neck of the ship. Piecing together what he had observed from their own ship Jack guessed that they were in the stern of the ship, from space they had seen that the whole ship was a gigantic cross, with the actual crossing near the stern showing two enormous fuselages on either side. The control room had been in the aft of the ship, on the opposite side of the imposing hallway they were staring down. Jack turned his head in a circle, observing the high ceiling and distant curved walls of the hallway. At intermittent spots there were large yellow boxes fastened low on the walls with large english-language warning labels on them.

_English._

"Carter, what do you suppose those are?" Jack pointed at the nearest box. 

Drawing close Carter reached out, but hesitated to touch the plastic surface. "It says Explosives."

"In English." Jack iterated. 

"Yeah in--" Stopping abruptly Carter looked up and made eye contact with Jack. "English." She echoed. 

"Something is not right here." Jack found himself whispering as he stared down the hallway towards the aft of the ship. "Daniel would know what this meant." He immediately regretted saying what he was sure they were all thinking. Daniel would know what this meant, past tense, Daniel might be lost to them. Jack fingered his zat again, the hairs on the back of his neck pricking. He looked to Carter and Teal'c, hoping for input.

"There are no more doors on the aft of the ship." Teal'c offered. 

"Teal'c's right, let's head back towards the control room." Jack turned sharply and tried marching resolutely down the hallway. Carter and Teal'c followed, but it seemed like a useless gesture. Jack felt as lost as Daniel was. 

The three made their way down the hallway in silence, their boots thumping loudly in the expansive gloom. Jack noted that there continued to be yellow boxes of explosives placed at regular intervals the entire way down the hallway. "Have you been scanning for Naquadria?" Jack hissed as they passed by the docking bay, treading slowly besides the rings they had arrived on. Jack noted a line of empty spacesuits hanging in a clear cabinet beside the airlock door. It was the halfway point between the spherical room and the rest of the ship. 

"I'm getting low-level traces everywhere on the ship, but I haven't picked up a large deposit yet." Carter replied, double checking a scanner she had clipped to her vest. "It could be very small deposits, or some sort of residual radiation on the ship."

"The SGC is pretty convinced there's something worthwhile here, or some bigwig is anyway. Otherwise General Landry wouldn't have made us come back." Jack glanced at the empty docking bay as they passed, studying the mechanisms of the loading doors. By all accounts many of the mechanisms on this ship could have been Earth-made, he saw a lot of inspiration from naval ships and aeroplanes. Not to mention Gothic architecture, with the high vaulted ceilings and dark atmosphere. "At least the artificial gravity is in good working order." Jack mumbled and they returned to silence, walking down the hall. 

_It couldn't have been trees, could it? A nice boring planet full of trees and rocks. I hate trees. But at least trees are just trees._ Jack thought morosely. 

Jack whiled away time by counting the yellow boxes of explosives and the high overhead lights in the hallway, periodically glancing sideways to Carter who was studying her scanner more often than not, or Teal'c who walked confidently with a stoic expression. At the end of the hallway there was a single door, only marginally less imposing than the spiralling door that lead to the spherical room. 

Inside the door was a room with several human-sized holding tanks, Carter had identified them as gravity couches on their first foray through the ship. She had explained that there were currently experiments in using gravity couches for long-term high-speed space exploration, similar to stasis. Jack couldn't imagine anything more unnerving than climbing into a giant test-tube and being told to stay there for six months, even if he would be asleep.

Beyond the gravity couch bay on the right was the medical bay, on the left was crew quarters, both doors labeled, and straight ahead was the control room and bridge. "Let's stick together from here on out." Jack hissed, still on edge after the spherical room and feeling like a child afraid of the dark. Like Charlie climbing into bed between him and Sarah in the middle of the night after a bad dream. Charlie had those dreams a lot. The three turned into the medical bay and scanned the room. There were a number of exam tables in the room, each had a neatly organized table next to it with a selection of instruments and lining the walls were cupboards full of tools and other medical paraphernalia. Cautiously, Jack approached the nearest exam table and looked down at a shallow metal tray sitting in the center of it. There was something red, slimy, and rotten resting in a small pool of rusty brown liquid.

"Carter." Jack gestured 'to me' with two fingers and pointed at the tray. "What do you suppose that is?"

Carter looked down at it, wincing slightly. "It's badly decomposed. It looks like--Maybe a heart?" She slowly lifted her head and made eye contact with Jack, the fear in her eyes was apparent, even as she tried to appear a strong-willed soldier.

"Did anyone say anything about what happened to the crew of this ship?" Jack managed.

"They did not." Teal'c confirmed. "To my knowledge the ship was discovered abandoned."

"Mm-hmm." Jack looked at the rancid heart for a moment longer before turning away from it. "Anyplace Daniel could be hiding in here?" 

Carter looked around the room slowly, studying the light fixtures over each exam table, the cupboards, and the relatively small spaces beneath the tables. "I don't see how he could be, Sir."

"Alright then," Jack suppressed a shudder, "Let's look at the crew quarters."

They turned and Jack pushed through the door to the medical bay first, glad to be away from the deceptively sterile room, trying to rid the image of the heart from mind. He turned and looked at the gravity couches as they passed them, six of them, the gravity couch on the far end by the crew quarters was full of a blue-green liquid, an oxygen mask suspended by a cord towards the top. He passed his reflection in the liquid and turned away from it sharply, worried that the next reflection he saw would be the other Jack. At the top of the liquid was a thin layer of mold, Jack wondered if the liquid was normally sterile, and why one of the gravity couches would have been left full to begin with.

Teal'c opened the door to the crew's quarters and Jack immediately reached up to cover his face from the rush of decaying odor that wafted into the gravity couch bay. Carter turned away from the room, but Jack couldn't avert his eyes. In the center of the room, surrounded by debris, was a human corpse. So much damage had been done to the body that Jack could not ascertain the sex, it was on bent knees with its back straight in the air, head tilted backwards, and trailing down the bloodied naked sternum was unmistakably the person's tongue, their jaw broken and neck torn, the ragged strip of muscle torn through both to hang like a necktie. 

"God." Carter sobbed, clutching at her stomach and beginning to heave. 

Streaks of blood radiated on the ground, extending from the corpse to the walls of the circular room, so that Jack imagined viewed from above the body would look like the center of a child's drawing of the sun. The smell was tremendous, the corpse had been in the room for weeks at least, decomposition having begun to eat away at the skin and change the color from pink to slimy viridian and splotches of puce. Circling the body, feeling a strange upwelling of desensitization, Jack locked eyes with two empty eye sockets, the eyes had not rotted away, judging by the deep gouges left in the skin on the face, they had been torn out. 

Looking away from the body, Jack busied himself studying the bunk beds, each set into an alcove in the wall containing a mattress and a small lamp. Some of the alcoves had been shut, but many of the open ones contained small mementos, magazine clippings and photographs. He paused at one of the alcoves, leaning in to examine a photograph of a family in front of Mount Rushmore. He tore it off the wall and studied the features of the mountain. "This was an American ship." He said, barely loudly enough for Carter to hear him from outside the room. "I don't know how, but we're on an American spaceship, but it's not one of ours."

"Please--" Jack couldn't see Carter, but he could hear her voice, "Please can we close this room?"

"Hang on. Teal'c, help me open these bunks." Together the two men opened the three closed alcoves, finding more trinkets but no more clues to the origin of the ship or the whereabouts of the rest of the crew. 

Teal'c left the room and Jack approached the corpse one last time, kicking aside the tattered remains of a jumpsuit that hung around its waist, radiating out along with the blood smears. He flipped over one piece and leaned down to examine a patch that he had made visible. _USS Event Horizon._ Exhaling, Jack left the room and found Teal'c rubbing small circles on Carter's back. He closed the door. "Someone has been very naughty." Jack muttered, causing Teal'c to raise an eyebrow. "This ship is not only from Earth, it's American. How did that happen under our noses?"

"I do not think it is from our Earth, O'Neill." Teal'c spoke as Carter lowered herself to sitting on the polished metal floor. "I believe this ship arrived through the Quantum Mirror." 

"It would explain a lot, Sir." Carter groaned. 

"Yeah I suppose it would." Jack muttered, and scanned the gravity couches along the wall. They were all empty. He paused on the tank that had been full of liquid fifteen minutes prior, and shrugged it off as his imagination. He could feel nervous tension blossoming between his shoulder blades and spreading down his spine. "Look alive, Carter. I wanna find Daniel ASAP and get the hell out of here." Turning abruptly, he slammed his palm down on the switch to open the main door to the bridge of the ship.

On the bridge the temperature had dropped several degrees since their last visit. The massive Quantum Mirror outside almost filled the entire view of the main window, and as the ship grew closer Jack could pick out stars and foreign constellations on the mirror's surface. For the first time Jack tried to really study the interior of the control room, there were a half-dozen or so long curved panels of buttons and dials that he could never hope to decipher. He approached the nearest one and tapped a glass screen embedded in the middle of it. Nothing happened.

"Carter?" Jack asked, trying to keep the tension out of his voice for the nth time, "Do you think you could get any of these up and running?"

"I'm not familiar with the technology, Sir." Carter ran her hand over the back of her neck, massaging a muscle there, "--But, given time..." She trailed away.

"That's what we don't have." Jack stared at the screen morosely, trying to make up his mind. "Find anything Teal'c?"

"There is no sign of DanielJackson in this room." Teal'c stated matter-of-factly.

Jack sighed and looked up at the viewing port. The bridge was dark, with all the panels burned out or switched off most of the light in the room was coming from the Quantum Mirror outside. "Well, team. Let's head back to the ship. We'll call in to General Landry and see if we can get some backup." Jack knew the hopelessness of that option tainted his speech. There was no backup, not on this side of the galaxy. Mitchell had brought him aboard a suicide mission, all because of a broken ankle.

Rubbing his moistened palms on the sides of his BDUs, Jack marched between Carter and Teal'c and out of the control room. _I have to get off this ship._ He could hear the soft regular steps of them behind him, he picked up pace. "Brisk march, people." He mumbled under his breath. About twenty yards ahead of them Jack could make out the segment of the long hallway that housed the airlock, docking station, and rings. One of the overhead lights was flickering unnervingly over a large heap of--something. He sprinted the last few yards, Carter and Teal'c hot on his heels.

There were heaps of wires piled all around the rings, the metal buckled and torn out of the floor, shadows flickering across the destruction under the fading broken light. "Oh my god." Carter whispered, fear having fully taken over her voice. "You don't think--Daniel--"

"I don't know." Jack tried his voice, steely under a building rage. He kicked one of the heaps over and could see how extensive the carnage was. Outside the airlock he could see their ship, skewed, floating like a half-dead fish. "DANIEL!" He screamed, the sound ripping through his throat, "WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?"

"Ja-ack." He heard in sing-song, the sound warbled by the static of a walkie-talkie. He grabbed the walkie off the front of his vest. "Ja-ack. Have you met her yet? Have you met the Event Horizon?"

Jack inhaled and exhaled, trying to remember breathing exercises he had been taught years prior, _I am calm I am calm I am calm_ , "Yes Daniel, we've met. Why don't you come out now?"

"Oh no Jack. I have so much work to do here. You always pull me away from my work, you and Cameron, always telling me there isn't enough time." The walkie buzzed loudly, like a nest of yellow jackets, "I'm in charge of the time now, Jack."

With a final burst of static the walkie went quiet. Jack tried to turn it back on, but was only rewarded with continued radio silence. He looked up slowly to meet Carter's eyes and saw that she was holding back tears. "What are we gonna do?" She asked brokenly.

"We're gonna fight this." Jack looked to Teal'c, "We've survived more dire circumstances, right?"

"I believe we have." Teal'c replied. 

"Good. Sam," Jack looked to his 2IC, hoping to instill some determination in her, "We're gonna go back to the bridge and see if we can't get this scrapheap running."

Carter nodded and wiped the beginnings of tears from her eyes.

"I will put on a suit and go to our ship." Teal'c put his burly hand on Jack's shoulder, and Jack could feel the weight of his offer. "Maybe I can dock our ship with the Event Horizon."

"I don't know Teal'c, something doesn't look right out there. I'm worried Daniel did something before he sabotaged the rings." Jack covered Teal'c's hand with his own, making him aware that Teal'c knew he was requesting a dangerous mission. 

"Be that as it may, it is imperative we call the SGC for backup. ColonelCarter needs your protection, O'Neill, I am the only one who can risk it." Without waiting for Jack's reply, Teal'c gently lifted the largest suit from where they hung by the door to the airlock. Determinedly Teal'c climbed into the suit, pulling the sleeves over his arms and ignoring Jack's unwillingness to help him. 

"I don't like separating the team." Jack muttered.

"The team has already been separated, O'Neill." Teal'c looked at him pointedly. "We will do what we must to survive this mission."

"Trust him, Sir. Teal'c's our best chance to get our ship back to us." A little bit of colour had returned to Carter's cheeks, resolution painting her voice. 

"Alright. Teal'c, we're counting on you." Jack tried to sound confident, but separating from Teal'c made him feel exposed to the hidden dangers of the ship. Carter stepped forward and quickly worked the controls of the airlock, opening the first large door. Inside the airlock there were two long handprints of rust-coloured blood, shoulder-width, streaked from midway through the airlock to the secondary door. The three members of SG-1 grew quiet.

Teal'c walked into the airlock and ran one gloved finger over one of the streaks, rubbing his fingers together. "It is dried." He flicked dried blood onto the ground. "The stain is old." 

"What the hell happened here?" Carter hissed shrilly. 

"I don't want to find out." Jack stated. "I just want to hurry up and get out of here." 

"I will leave quickly. I will try to radio you from the ship, perhaps there will be less interference." Lifting his helmet over his head, Teal'c quickly latched it on the side. 

"Be careful out there, big guy." Jack said solemnly as the outer door of the airlock closed tightly. 

Looking away from the window into the airlock, Jack glanced at the long rack of space suits hanging next to it. Two of them were missing. The suit Teal'c had taken, and, Jack assumed, the suit whoever had left the bloody handprints in the airlock had been wearing. Somewhere in the back of his mind one and one were not adding up to two, but he dispelled the thought to concentrate on the task at hand. The secondary door had opened and Teal'c had pushed out of the airlock, using thrusters on the back of the suit to direct him towards their ship. The distance between the Event Horizon and their tiny ship seemed monumental, and it was only a few moments before Teal'c appeared to be a miniature toy spaceman on a vast black background. Jack watched quietly until Teal'c had disappeared into their airlock before he turned back to Carter.

"Let's head back to the bridge." He said, his voice sounded strained and quiet in his own ears. Carter nodded tersely in response. They were silent as they walked down the hallway, both staring straight ahead. Sometimes, when he had still been the commander of SG-1, Jack had thought of Teal'c sort of like a security blanket. If Teal'c was there, he would be calm and collected, and if Teal'c was calm and collected then everything would work out just fine. Whenever Teal'c separated from the group Jack had always started to worry, always considered that the situation was rapidly moving from bad to worse. He wondered if Carter felt the same way, and decided that for his own peace of mind he would assume she did. He hated to think that he relied more on Teal'c than she did, believing somewhere in the back of his mind that his reliance was a weakness.

The light inside the gravity couch bay gave the room a stark appearance, and Jack felt his stomach twist with unhappiness. He scanned the gravity couches and noted that they were all empty. Wiping his palms on his BDUs, leaving long sweat stains, Jack led Carter into the control room and deck. "Do you know where to start?" Jack felt stupid for asking.

"Let me try this first bank, I'll see if I can get the monitor running." Sam tapped a few dead keys, mechanical clicks echoing across the dark room.

Jack looked away, he felt useless. Teal'c went off all muscle and determination to save everyone, Carter was using her brain to crack the operating system of the ship, and Jack was standing beside her with his hands in his pockets. Dead weight, a commander of one. He stared out the viewing window at the Quantum Mirror where it dominated the view fully. When Charlie had died they held a wake for him in their home, Sarah had met all the guests, accepted their platitudes and their coats and played the perfect grieving mother and hostess, while Jack uselessly sat in the back room alone with his head in his hands. He almost felt like he could see a reflection of himself in the mirror, but of course it wouldn't be an exact reflection per se. It would be that other Jack, one who had lived a different life than his, maybe only marginally different. Maybe Charlie had lived. Maybe Sarah had died.

Maybe he had never been drawn to the suicide mission that led to the Stargate. 

That other Jack might be much happier, he might be living a life of comfort and tranquility in retirement. Charlie might even have his own kids, other Jack could be a grandfather. 

"Sir," Carter's voice followed by a marginal increase of light turned Jack around, breaking him from his reverie. The first control panel was on. "I think I can get the others on a little faster, now that I know what to do."

"Perfect." Jack said, his voice quieter than he had intended. Carter smiled slightly at him, perspiration on her forehead reflecting the lights of the control panel and monitor. "Anything on there that can help us?"

"I need to get the rest of the system online before I'll be able to tell." Quietly Carter moved to the next panel, her concentration moved away from Jack.

Jack turned back around just in time to see their ship come into view to the right of the window, moving dangerously close to the Quantum Mirror, tilted towards its side in flight. "Shit!" Jack whooped, "I think Teal'c's got the ship running, but something might be wrong--"

Before Jack could finish Teal'c's body slammed into the viewing window, eerily quiet through the thick material and the vacuum of space. Jack's breath caught in his throat as he jumped back before he could process the sight before him. Teal'c's suit was torn open through the torso, his bloated face visible through the shattered helmet, purple and bloody in death. Strips of fabric and gore fanned out from the open hole in the suit, one of the yellow explosives boxes was wedged into his open chest cavity, bloody handprints splattered across it. At some point Jack became aware of Carter screaming behind him, a shrill continuous sound. One of the thrusters on Teal'c's suit was still barely functioning, a sputtering blast emitted from it, propelling Teal'c away from the Event Horizon and towards the quantum mirror. He exploded between, too far from either to do any lasting damage.

"Oops." Jack's radio crackled to life. "I caught Teal'c trying to radio to Earth."

"What is happening to you, Daniel?" Jack growled into his walkie-talkie, his voice steady where his adrenaline, fear, and rage were whirlpooling within him.

"That's a big no-no, Jack. The Event Horizon wants to take us home, Teal'c lost that opportunity. But you two can still come with us." Daniel giggled, his voice mixing with the constant radio static.

"Daniel come out here." Jack pleaded, "Come and talk to us face to face, we can still get out of here."

"I'm on my way, Jack." The radio beeped loudly and then the line was dead. 

Jack looked up and met Carter's eyes, expecting tears, but finding the thin hard line of her mouth betraying nothing but determination and survival instinct. "How fast can you get those running?"

"On it." Carter replied, setting to work. She had already provided power to two of four panels. Jack walked alongside them, looking at the many buttons and dials, wondering if they were going to be able to run the Event Horizon. He tried to consider other options, but didn't find any. Jack sighed and acknowledged that he might die here. It wasn't the first time he had thought so on a mission, it was worth it to make peace with yourself, even if you did pull through and live in the end. But on previous missions he had seen a way out, or had at least been able to hope for a deus ex machina to rescue them, such as the Asgard. 

Approaching the first panel, Jack saw that there was a video loaded on the screen. He reached down and cautiously clicked the play button. A barrage of sounds assaulted them from the speakers, human and electronic, buzzing, white noise, screaming in a way that he had hoped to never hear another human being scream. Jack slammed his hand down on the panel, trying to turn it off in any way possible. The image was entirely static. 

"What did you do!?" Carter hollered as she ran over, fingers flying across the keyboard to quiet the sound. 

"There was a video on the screen, I--I hit play." Jack could feel that the colour had drained from his face. 

"It was a transmission, it was a recording the Event Horizon sent to Earth--To the other Earth--" Carter's voice sounded faraway as she studied long lines of text scrolling over the screen. "I don't think we're going to the other Earth, sir. I think that the Quantum Mirror is taking us--someplace in between."

"She's right." Carter and Jack had been so absorbed in the video that they hadn't heard the door to the bridge open, or Daniel walk up behind them. They both jumped away from them, Daniel held up his hands to show he held no weapons.

He looked more or less the same that he had when they lost him at the start of their second foray on the abandoned ship. His hair stuck up at odd angles, and his black t-shirt was untucked from his BDUs in places, giving him a disheveled appearance, and his eyes still rolled wildly around the room, as though taking every detail in all at once. Jack was crouched on the opposite side of the console, gripping the edge tightly, preparing to run at the first moment necessary. 

"They wanted to build a Supergate, they were trying to find a way to expediently move an entire ship from one side of the galaxy to the other." Daniel stayed where he was, an attempt to appear non-threatening. It didn't work. "They only built one 'gate, that was the first flaw. The second was when a malfunction caused their wormhole to solidify."

"How is that possible?" Carter whispered, mostly to herself.

"They build a special drive on the ship that was meant to control the wormhole, there was a malfunction between the two. It couldn't be repeated deliberately if Earth scientists in both universes tried for a thousand years." Daniel sighed blissfully. "They inadvertently created the Super Quantum Mirror. Before carrying them to another universe, the Proxima Centauri of a different Earth, the Super Quantum Mirror brought them someplace else. Someplace beautiful."

"And that's where you want to go." Jack finished for Daniel. 

"That's where we are going." Daniel tried to correct him. "Someplace life normally never gets to visit. Someplace new, vibrant, _exquisitely macabre_."

"What the fuck is wrong with you, Daniel!?" Jack raised his voice.

"You've heard her, Jack." Daniel lowered his to a whisper. "I know you've heard her quiet musings in your head. She knows, she wants to bring you gently to that quiet dark place. To _the other you_." 

"Sir?" Sam slowly moved her eyes from Daniel to Jack. 

The other Jack. The one who looked out at him when he saw his reflection, the angrier, happier, more alive Jack who knew more, felt more, loved more, than Jack ever could imagine. The Jack from the other Earth, the Jack from that place in between who judged him, sneered at him through the orange-black surface of the sphere. 

"Yes, I saw the other Jack." Jack responded. "But he's a figment of my imagination. I got reminded of Charlie, hell I do all the time, and I wondered if the Jack in the parallel universe maybe never lost him. It was stupid of me to think it, what's done is done."

"No, Jack, you saw the _other you_ , the one who exists in between the universes, the one who has the ability to inflict great power, and he's not a figment of your imagination." Daniel grinned widely and Carter took a step back away from both of them.

"Don't be scared, Sam. You'll understand." Daniel cooed blithely. Without warning Daniel lunged forward, vaulting over the control panel to knock Jack to the ground. They wrestled over each other on the cold metal flooring, Jack dug into Daniel's skin with his nails, gripping, flailing, pulling hair, until Daniel wrestled him onto his stomach, gripping his neck with one forearm, the other hand carefully planted on top of his head. Jack understood the warning plainly, Daniel could break his neck easily if he so chose. Jack went limp and Daniel hefted him up to a standing position so they were both facing Carter. With a quick flick Daniel pulled Jack's zat out of the holster and kicked it across the bridge.

"Sam," Jack choked out, Daniel tightened his grip. "You have to run."

"What, but sir--"

"--Run Sam, get the hell out of here, go try to fix the rings or--or--" Jack broke off as Carter was enveloped by a blinding white light, her body gradually dematerializing from the room.

"I thought Teal'c might have got a message off." Daniel muttered into Jack's ear, his breath hot and moist in the cold air, "The Event Horizon won't let me go, and since I had you--Well, we're both here to stay Jackie-boy."

Daniel loosened his grip and Jack pulled away. The weight of the situation hit his shoulders hard. He was going to die here, without any doubt, this was the end of the line. _But at least Sam made it out, they got her just in time._

"You and I, Jack. It's you and I and the Event Horizon. The way it was meant to be." Daniel's airy whispers had a euphoric quality to them.

Once again Jack felt the cold black rage overtake him, _Daniel killed Teal'c, and he would have killed Sam, too._ Howling, Jack flew at Daniel fists first, colliding with his face, punching him squarely in the gut, until Daniel pushed Jack away with tremendous strength, propelling him to the floor. "She won't let you kill me, you know. If you kill me she'll only bring me back." 

"What are you trying to do, anyway?" Jack wheezed, scrabbling to his feet. 

"I'm helping her get home. Isn't that what we do? We travel the galaxy--" Daniel paced in a hemisphere around Jack, "--Helping. She came all the way here, and now she needs to go home--See her creator, spread the good word."

"It's a ship, Daniel! It's not alive, it's just a ship!" Jack backed away from his pacing until he found his back resting squarely on the cold wall. He spread his fingers out, palms flat on the surface.

"That's where you're wrong. That other place, the place that's in between our universes, she found sentience there. It brought her to life, and now she needs to share that with her creator." Daniel drew closer and Jack could smell the sickly sour odor of his sweat, "Doctor William Weir, though I think you're aware of our universe's counterpart--our Doctor Elizabeth Weir."

Jack gasped, "But--"

"--The road not taken, Jack, or roads in this instance." Grinning, Daniel lunged one arm out towards Jack, gripping his shirt by the shoulder and yanking him forward. In a flash of silver Daniel suddenly had Jack's knife in his head, lashing out at his abdomen with it. Jack dodged, ducking under Daniel's arms and darting behind him. 

"Come on, Jack, it's going to be beautiful! Like a work of art!" Daniel waved the knife wildly in his hand, and Jack noted with relief that his zat was missing from its holster. At least Teal'c had done him that one last favour, he assumed. 

_I'm already dead_ Jack acknowledged, _The best thing I could do is take Daniel and his ship out with me._ Eyes on Daniel, Jack dodged another swing and ran at the nearest control panel, swiping his hands across the keys blindly, flipping switches, slapping the keyboards several times before running to the next. Without his zat Jack had little ability to destroy the control panels that were now operational, but hopefully he could at least trigger some reaction in them. 

"Stop it Jack!" Daniel screamed, his lunges becoming more erratic, one of them taking purchase in Jack's shoulder and leaving a long deep gouge. 

Blood poured down his left arm, pooling on the ground and leaving slick puddles as Jack slammed keys and turned dials on the next panel. With a lurch Jack realized he had managed to turn off the artificial gravity as his feet left the ground. The sudden weightlessness distracted Jack enough that Daniel was able to dig his blade into his side, Jack could feel the hot blood pour out of the wound, knocking Daniel had found an organ, but shock kept the pain from hitting him right away. Jack kicked Daniel in the gut, sustaining another knife wound to his leg before the force pushed Daniel several feet behind him. Jack used the momentum to swim towards the next panel, running his hands over the keys until a warning klaxon started blaring through the ship. 

"Life support shut down in 5--4--3--"

"God dammit Jack!" Daniel was on him, and blood loss stole his strength, keeping him from pushing Daniel off. Daniel gripped Jack's face in his hands, straddling his aching torso, and dug his thumbs into Jack's eyes. Screaming with exertion, Jack tried to push Daniel off, but Daniel only resorted to digging his whole hands into Jack's eye sockets, clawing out chunks of flesh to float with beads of blood in the gravity-less room, which was starting to look like a red snow-globe. As the blood loss gradually drove Jack into unconsciousness his last thought was that it was very cold on the ship, and that he could see the very tip passing into the Super Quantum Mirror. 

\- - -

Pushing off of Jack's corpse, Daniel moved towards the door of the control room, paddling through the air and using the doorframe to propel himself forward. The ship was growing colder, and he had only a small amount of oxygen left in the ship to make it to the drive core, to re-enter the sphere and wait for the Event Horizon's homecoming. 

\- - -

As the bright white light left, Sam found herself in the SGC's debriefing room, facing a cheering crowd of Vala, Landry, Cameron, Walter, and half a dozen other faces she couldn't process. She looked behind her, around her, and saw that Jack wasn't with her. With slow movements Sam sank to her knees and covered her face in her hands, caterwauling helplessly as she heard Vala ask "Where's Daniel?" Simultaneously as Walter said, "We could only lock down on Colonel Carter, we weren't able to find the others on the ship..."

It was all over.


End file.
